Browsers: one tab = one process

[the_net_2.0]

all,

I have been using chrome for a while, after firefox starting lagging something serious.

But I did find out long ago that chrome uses a process or 2 per each tab that's opened. Can anyone shed some light on this for me? Chrome and google forums do say things, but nothing really intelligent. As in, nothing that you can use to infer what's really going on. I'm typing this message with one chrome tab on one window, and I've got 5 chrome processes in my tmgr. 3 of them are over 30K in size.

Can anyone shed some light on this stuff? I believe, but dont quote me, that I've been seeing this since the day I downloaded it. I have not run tests on FF, but my guess is that it would be the same.

I have also noticed that just booting chrome opens up 4 processes immediately. And every browser window or tab opened after that initial adds one more single process. I'd kind of like a hint on that too. Don't really understand why a browser app would need 4 processes to boot up and simply run itself.

Thanks!

 

[Banana]

The idea is that by splitting a new process for each tab, you won't see the browser as whole affected by one misbehaving page. Surely you've experienced the case where when you landed on one bad page, the whole browsers, regardless of which tab you are using is running slowly or even crash, taking all tabs down. This is because when it's a single process handling all tabs, there's no way to recover all good things from this process. When the process must crash, everything with it must go, too.

By spawning a new process per tab, all tabs can keep doing their things without other tab bringing it down.

This technique has been used by other software (several RDBMS, in fact, adopt some variation of this techniques to improve concurrency & reliability).

 

[Banana]

BTW, you may find it interesting...

 

[the_net_2.0]

BTW, you may find it interesting...

Nice. I love it. =)

hey, btw...I finally found the info page on chrome's extensions and plugins. Many of my installs, such as VLC, AVG, etc... automatically created a plug in for chrome. So my plugin page listed like 50 items. I disabled all of them but 2. Works fine now!

IMO, as I have seen at this point, none of them are absolutely necessary, except for the default plugin and Java.

thanks for the cartoon!